.

RT@MarissaJoilette

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Dawes - Coming Back To A Man

RT@MarkForman

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R.D. Laing

"True sanity entails in one way or another the dissolution of the normal ego, that false self competently adjusted to our alienated social reality... and through this death a rebirth and the eventual re-establishment of a new kind of ego-functioning, the ego now being the servant of the soul, no longer its betrayer".

- R.D. Laing

RT@BrandyGeorge

Recent Gigs

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

... (and other poems).

I

Strange to think of you, gone without corsets and eyes, while I walk on

the sunny pavement of the harbour foreshore

up all night again reading books and poems long forgotten

and streaming the songs of 2007.

I'd said every word I had left

and again I'm In the park, just the two of us, your memory and I,

an unforgiving rhythm I break by reading the

last stanzas of cummings aloud to the rippling bay

and the glass towers that stole our gaze and

once ate my soul -- and I wept realising how much we suffer.

Ginsberg would send me across my own mortality. He'd situate

it all against the grand story of the self-life. And I reckon you'd like that.

-- but I always erred towards something a little closer to home.

I'd tread this path with you one balmy night before a gallery visit,

and again when I'd been left to riddles. and again today,

under a cloud tall as the sky, always out of reach.

under the window office battlements that guard the dreams of men.

where the view is just brake lights and oblivion.

I'd tread the shore before, looking over my shoulder for an answer or

a simple glimpse. I'd sat at Lady Macquarie's chair

and let Jung speak prophecy to me from the grave - answers

perhaps about why we suffer. And some old Buddhist story

would tape together my leaking hope enough to walk

the way back around to the soapboxes. We'd sat there before

after an especially long day wandering in the spring gardens.

I'd thought about having mango trees, with you, just like the song.

- and you'd thought of me, I could have sworn it.

Who can foresee forever? Not even the Lords of the void,

the hollowing presences, have access to those times.

Their bidding is eternity, not forever.

I'd sat with you under these figtrees. Once like spring sprung.

You should see it now, dumbfounding like a tree, broken, or flower--fed to the

ground--but made, with its petals, colored, to a thinking Great Universe.

II

"Magnificent, mourned no more, marred of heart, mind behind, married dreamed, mortal changed--Ass and face done with murder. In the world, given, flower maddened, made no Utopia, shut under pine, almed in Earth, blamed in Lone, Jehovah, accept. Nameless, One Faced, Forever beyond me, beginningless, endless, Father in death.Tho I am not there for this Prophecy, I am unmarried, I'm hymnless, I'm Heavenless, headless in blisshood I would still adore Thee, Heaven, after Death, only One blessed in Nothingness, not light or darkness, Dayless Eternity-- Take this, this Psalm, from me, burst from my hand in a day, some of my Time, now given to Nothing--to praise Thee--But Death This is the end, the redemption from Wilderness, way for the Wonderer, House sought for All, black handkerchief washed clean by weeping --page beyond Psalm--Last change of mine and her--to God's perfect Darkness--Death, stay thy phantoms!"

III

On napkins I still scribble your names, and His, and mine, and

spirals and stars of the Nameless names. Long nights in my new apartment

tea-soaked pages of story and sublimation which hum

baritone minors and faded defences. I scratch my burden into sea sands

across from where we tried to make a home. A plant we'd left there still

tries for the clouds as high as the sky.

I'd take a triple three back to the foreshore, and breathe

mystical patterns on the windows. Holy! I don't want this lot.

Participation mystique like a net and a crutch while I untangle ropes

around the terrain. For the benefit of all beings, it suggests.

-- but I always erred towards something a little closer to home.

Old lampshades from the side of the road cover the night lights just

like you'd taught. A kind of atmosphere unrepeatable. Even with you.

Angus and Julia Stone - Mango Tree [Official Music Video]

:,(

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Philosopher's Stone - The Elixir of Enlightenment

"… as long as you feel it, are in touch with it, devoted to it, respect it… revere it - then it doesn't matter what your mind does in terms of its delusions. It will expose them and shatter them. Then the mind cannot think of being careful, the heart cannot try to protect itself or take itself to some place. It's the essential nature of the soul that does the whole thing".

- A.H. Almaas

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Wilco and Billy Bragg - California Stars

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Afterglow

From primal wound, thrust, 

to far moons, lost, and unto 

new dawns, awoken.

Kabir's Jewel - Rabindranath Tagore

The jewel has been lost in matter
and everybody is looking for it.
Some look for it in the east
and some in the west,
some in water
and some among stones.
But the servant Kabir
has found its value
and has it wrapped with care
in the seam of the mantle of his heart.

- Rabindranath Tagore

Jung and Dreams

"This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic"

"The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach".

- C. G. Jung.

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Carl Jung - Anima Projection

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The Inward Gaze - Peter Birkhauser

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Transformational Festivals - Jeet Kei Leung

This explains everything I receive, offer, experience and dream when I'm in relation with this worldview and social practice. When it courses through me and comes to me. So very well said.

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Transforming Sexuality: The Archetypal World of Anima Animus

"All psychological theory, even the most elegant, is rooted in indeterminacy: its material changes just as one is drawing conclusions about it. What we can offer here are maps to orient our lived experience, no more, but also no less. The country that the anima/animus idea leas us into is volatile and deeply quiet, often explosive yet unutterable, both personal and pointing beyond our ego world to open us to claims upon us for which the ego might make the greatest of sacrifices. Maps are essential in such territory".

- Ann & Barry Ulanov, Transforming Sexuality: The Archetypal World of Anima Animus

Anima/Animus - Contrasexual Archetypes

One of Jung's most attacked, and yet IMO consistently profound, insights. Particularly in dealing with the parent projections in later relations, and that oft-quoted pearl "the greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents" - the mother secretly dreaming of extroverting logos in the world of work and career and ploughing that transcendent telos into the children, or the father befuddled by the feminine principle in a culture which supported aborting his dip into the unconscious anima, and rendering it the job of the sensitive-self children. In my generation (if not my very own life) pacing around the smouldering ruins and dizzying pinnacles of 40 years of a not terribly peaceful gender tussle, Jung's hardy explication of contrasexual archetypes is a wonderful (almost sensuously archeological) gift from the core of the libidinal, archetypal and family-relation pathways in psyche. It's almost so simple prima facie to have been lost in the mire of the (ironically dominant) inclusive-sensitive self culture I have been passed through... and so simply captured in this gruff little diagram! Thanks, Brandy George.

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Theory U

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Enso

"It is external activity that unlocks the circle of internal mental processes, that opens it up to the objective world.

The subject-activity-object transitions form a kind of circular movement, so it may seem unimportant which of its elements or moments is taken as the initial one. But this is by no means movement in a closed circle. The circle opens, and opens specifically in sensuous practical activity itself. Entering into direct contact with objective reality and submitting to it, activity is modified and enriched; and it is in this enriched form that it is crystallised in the product".

- Aleksei Leontiev

RT@BrandyGeorge

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

First Steps

Threads through(,)

stacked invocations

, and breathe.

Mighty view(,)

gentle incantations

, and breathe.

Spreads(,) induce(s)

lilting prostrations

, and breathe.

(")All shall be well, and all shall be well,

and all manner of things shall be well(").

(")and death (I think) is no parenthesis(").

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Amazing Grace!

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A Hypoagapic Oath

Whirlwinds of 

swirling intimacy...

... relation itself

my bleeding body.

Where we can first do no harm.

Thin-skins and

thorny degeneracy...

... migrations to

a strong geography.

Where could we first do no harm?

Chagrins and

grinding inadequacy...

... sensation becomes

the pointed territory.

First, we can do no harm.

Changelings thrown

to lying opacity...

... relation itself

my breathing body.

Unarmed. First do no harm.

Unarmed. First do no harm.

Unarmed. First do no harm.

William Blake

Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.

- William Blake

That Awkward Moment When Motivational Posters Reach Turquoise

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Michael Leunig

When the heart
Is cut or cracked or broken
Do not clutch it
Let the wound lie open
Let the wind
From the good old sea blow in
To bathe the wound with salt

Let a stray dog lick it
Let a bird lean in the hole and sing
A simple song like a tiny bell
And let it ring
Let it go. Let it out.
Let it all unravel.
Let it free and it can be
A path on which to travel.

- Michael Leunig

My Sweet, Crushed Angel - Hafiz

You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One.

You have waltzed with great style,
My sweet, crushed angel,
To have ever neared God's Heart at all.

Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow,
And even His best musicians are not always easy
To hear.

So what if the music has stopped for a while.

So what
If the price of admission to the Divine
Is out of reach tonight.

So what, my dear,
If you do not have the ante to gamble for Real Love.

The mind and body are famous
For holding the heart ransom,
But Hafiz knows the Beloved's eternal habits.

Have patience,
For He will not be able to resist your longing
For long.

You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to kiss the Beautiful One.

You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,
O my sweet,
Oh my sweet, crushed angel.

- Hafiz

(A touching gift from Kim).

De-Oedipus

Mother's lost embrace

erects dignity to man.

All you had to do.

Whatever Works

The sun goldens with a provoking geometry.

Eyes below the horizons, this hypotenuse transmits

what they tell me is an illusion of singular contact.

An illusion which comes straight to me!!

But what of the reflections? The shadows?

Those too, straight to me! But perhaps,

just perhaps, not source. Or, you know

at least that's what works today.

In a circular universe these angles

direct to you and I, in some kind of

Pythagorean configuration or someshit,

to wellsprings of new inclinations.

Rising up at right angels, seems... right.

You're there, and I'm (over) (here). But always

at this precise gradient (I tell you!) transmitting

an illusion of singular contact when

the old fella hangs at these watchful, dusky heights.

Letting Go of Holding On - Pema Chodron

"Renunciation does not have to be regarded as negative. I was taught that it has to do with letting go of holding back. What one is renouncing is closing down and shutting off from life. You could say that renunciation is the same thing as opening to the teachings of the present moment.... Renunciation is realizing that our nostalgia for wanting to stay in a protected, limited, petty world is insane. Once you begin to get the feeling of how big the world is and how vast our potential for experiencing life is, then you really begin to understand renunciation. When we sit in meditation, we feel our breath as it goes out, and we have some sense of willingness just to be open to the present moment. Then our minds wander off into all kinds of stories and fabrications and manufactured realities, and we say to ourselves, "It's thinking." We say that with a lot of gentleness and a lot of precision. Every time we are willing to let the story line go, and every time we are willing to let go at the end of the outbreath, that's fundamental renunciation: learning how to let go of holding on and holding back". 

~ Pema Chodron, Tricycle, The Buddhist Review, Vol. I, #1

Things Are Fundamentally Groundless - Reginald A Ray

The buddhahdarma says, "things are fundamentally groundless." We can see this very vividly in our own lives. Some people actually think that they have secure ground in their lives, their jobs, their relationships, finances, whatever. In that case, they put a lot of energy into trying to maintain that secure ground that they think they have. This is the conventional approach. While it may temporarily produce a modicum of comfort and security, it doesn't solve--or even address--the fundamental problems of our lives, namely that at best--things are always uncertain and we live on the edge of death.

Then there is the approach of the buddhadharma. Most of us practitioners feel quite groundless a lot of the time, if not most or even all of the time. We want to get things together; we want situations to be clear; we want people to understand and appreciate us; we want to know where we stand and who we are. But somehow, we can never get any of this to happen in a definitive way. We feel shaky and unresolved about the important things in our lives. Our relationships are problematic and we cycle between hope (that they're working) and fear (that they're not). Our employment situations are marked by uncertainty, lack of clarity, and questionable future prospects. People are in their own worlds and we can never get them to be or do what we want. And our own sense of identity is constantly up in the air. We can never quite arrive anywhere or come to any definite conclusions about ourselves.

As the dharma says, groundlessness is not a temporary experience or a random insecurity and it is not a problem that can be fixed. It is just the way things are. In meditation practice, we have a chance to be with that feeling of groundlessness and explore it. And groundlessness eventually opens up into the dharmadhatu, the limitless space of mind in which everything is free to be what it is and what occurs is seen as the play of wisdom.

- Reginald A Ray.

To I No More

Hope disperses like
sand on a forgotten track
to some promised land.

This promise will hang
tight like a noose, starving the
air from real objects.

By inference alone
I am known. Speculated
on, over.. anon.

Earth ever loosens
under toe. My child is no
more. Our child no more.

And you would have me
consumed. On, over.. anon.
On inference alone.

I reach and I grasp.
Howls fractured at right angles.
Orthogonal hopes.

Shield eye with cupped hand,
I try for yours too. It is
all I know. Just this.

All inadequate.
All so embryonic. Just
fucking beyond me.

Gone, gone, gone beyond.
I look for you. I look for
all of us, once more.

No ancestors. No
guide. Crestfallen and breathless.
A brave chest - a lie.

Language won't save us,
where the sins of the father
demand my demise.

My child is no more.
We tread wrong geography
to stay side-by-side.

Every How? and Why?
I've ever known, not enough
to find home once more.

My grip tries to firm
the sand on this road. Wrestle
at nothing, but hope.

Disperses like death
of a child never known, and
father's sin misdrawn.

All of this echoes
in a room bare. Once mine, now
someone else in there.

I am but shadows,
on, over.. anon. Among
hard shoulders, cried on.

I shriek though voiceless.
What is better left unsaid?
Child, our child is dead.

Landscapes just language.
Your heart a map. Thresholds yield
Unvoiced stories. Trapped.

Gone, gone, gone beyond.
I look for you. I look for
all of us, once more.

Pistol pupils drawn.
I open toward. It is
all I know. Just this.

All inadequate.
All so embryonic. Just
fucking beyond me.

To the man who would
be king, I say only one
thing. Only one thing.

Though voiceless, I squeal
He is dead. She is dead. I
am no more to be.

And inference alone
is my fate. Speculated
on, over.. anon.

I stare into that
which turns men to stone. I see
hope and love (alone).

Still the promise hangs
tight like a noose, starving the
heir. My child is gone.

All karmas aside,
my end is near. The first, the
last. No-thing to fear.

...while I am standing still. I prefer the stillness here.

14/10/2011.

Janey and Silk, incarnated in one body, perceived by one mind, known by one taste.

Manhattan in form, and formless. Dispersed. Rendered still. A stone witness.

A last remaining link. From the puppet strings in a clockwork universe. With. No. Clockmaker.

When you left me, I left earth. Does that not show you that I care? (, Silk). (If) Only Silk knew.

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Automatic Experiences after the Siddha Yoga Shaktipat Initiation

Some characteristic symptoms of the awakened serpent power, Kundalini, are given below. They are illustrative and by no means exhaustive.

1) When throbbing (vibrating) at the base of spinal column (Mooladhara) begins, when the whole body starts shaking, involuntary breathlessness starts beyond control, when breath is forcibly exhaled out, without volition deep inhaling and exhaling of breath starts and when the body gets uncontrollable, know that the Bhagavati Kundalini has awakened and become active. You should then give up your assertive approach and sit witnessing what happens.

2) When your posture (asana) becomes fixed, Uddayan, Jalandhar and Moolbandhs result involuntarily, when you feel so energetic that you are unable to sit quietly, know that the Paramashakti Kundalini has become active.

3) When your posture (asana) becomes (fixed) steady and sight is attracted towards the middle point of eyebrows and you get automatic Kumbhak (cessation of breath comes with no effort for inhaling or exhaling) and the mind becomes vacant, void of all outward knowledge, feel that Primal Power Goddess, Mahamaya Adyashakti Kundalini, has come into action.

4) When you feel currents of the Life Force (Prana)rising from Mooladhara upward to your cerebrum (Sahasrara) within you, automatic repetition of Aum starts and with the rising of the Life Force (Prana) upward, the mind experiences waves after waves of blissful ecstasy (happiness), think that the Universal Mother, Jagadamba Kundalini, has come into action.

5) When you feel that bodily existence for the time being is lost (you feel as if there is no body) everything looks vacant, your eyelids become slightly closed and inspite of your efforts do not open, electric-like currents flowing give delightful joy, know that the Mahamaya Kundalini has come into action.

6) When with the closing of eyes (eyelids) your body falls to the ground and you feel as if your life is passing away, nerves being strained, know that the Yogamaya Kundalini has become active.

7) When your mind gets influenced spiritually as if some spirit has taken possession of your body and under that influence different postures (asanas) of yoga are involuntarily performed and at the same time some sort of breathing exercises start, know that the Divine power of Kundalini, Ishwariya Kundalini Shakti, has become active.

8) When you close your eyes and decide to sit for meditation, your body begins to feel a pleasant sensation (happiness), know that Rudrani Mahashakti Kundalini has become active.

9) When you feel vibrations (movements) of Prana (Life Force) at different parts in your body and feel its flow wherever you fix your attention and your nerves begin to show easy jerks like the shocks of electricity giving pleasant experience, know that the Vidyut Shakti Kundalini has come into action.

10) When all day and night you feel within your body some activity of (Life Force) Prana is going on and whenever you concentrate your mind, your mind becomes filled with joy and bliss at all times, even during the time of sleep you feel currents of (Life Force) Prana rising up in your Sahasrara and even in dreams you experience movements of Prana (Life Force), know that the joy inspiring Alhadini Kundalini has come into action.

11) As soon as you sit for meditation, your body begins to shake and in ecstasy of joy, you involuntarily utter words and speak language not known to you nor anyone else, yet the sound gives you joy, know that goddess of speech, Saraswati, has come into action.

12) When you feel intoxicated (without taking any intoxicant) and feel like drunk of Divinity, know that your Atma Shakti has come into action

13) While walking when your mind is filled with an impulse to walk faster and do not feel tired (fatigued) even though you have walked a long distance, you feel buoyant and joyful, you do not feel unhappy even in dreams, your balance of mind is not disturbed in all ups and downs, no work is difficult for you, know that Brahma Shakti Kundalini has come into action.

14) While in meditation you see divine visions, have divine fragrance, feel divine taste, hear divine sounds and experience divine touch and receive instructions from the gods, understand that the divine power, Daivi Shakti, has come into action.

15) When you are in meditation, future unholds its secrets to you the hidden meaning of scriptures, Vedas and Vedantas shine on your understanding, all doubts vanish, you acquire an insight into obstruse meaning of the works on any science even at their first glance, you acquire strange powers of oratory and do not feel the need of approaching even Brahma, the creator of the world for knowledge and you acquire self-confidence, understand that the bestower of occult powers, Siddha Shakti Kundalini, has come into action.

16) As soon as you sit for meditation your sight becomes fixed in the mid of eyebrows, your tongue rises up for khechari, breath stops altogether (completely) and mind plunges into the ocean of bliss, Shambhavi Mudra operates and you experience the pleasures of Savikalpa Samadhi, know that Subtle power, Yogashakti Kundalini, is in action.

17) While in the meditation, if you think of any spiritual experience, you see your subtle body, you are not conscious about the time, know that Chit Shakti Kundalini has come into action.

18) As you sit for meditation, your mind gets concentrated and you can talk with the Gods and Goddess who can prescribe medicines for a disease, can give divine Mantra to remove difficulty (obstacles in progress) and when you receive spiritual knowledge or guidance (advice) from any Siddha, know that Siddhi Pradayini Kundalini has come into action.

Special Note:

What type of experiences and to whom they are assigned is decided by the Serpent Power (Kundalini Shakti) i.e. by the will of the spiritual master. Each and every individual gets different experiences. The initiate has to simply watch whatsoever divine experiences come to his lot. An initiate will receive spiritual experiences on the day of initiation or even after some days. The initiate should not expose his experiences to anyone but to his spiritual master.

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Bashō in translation and my ever-ready haibun journal.

From time to time

The clouds give rest

To the moon beholders

In my dark winter

lying ill, at last I ask

how fares my neighbour

- Matsuo Bashō

To my Burning Man haibun:

Blank, leatherbound leaves

evoke my aspiration.

"Third time is a charm".

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Mitakuye Oyasin

Mitakuye Oyasin (All Are Related) is a traditional Lakota Sioux prayer, with its opening phrase used as a refrain in many Lakota prayers and songs.

It reflects the inherent belief of most Native American traditions and belief systems that "Everything is Connected".

The Lakotas, Dakotas and Nakotas all the Native American tribes revere the prayer.

It is used in all Yankton spiritual ceremonies and activities, like Peyotism, and employed as a prayer to end other prayers, after which the sacred food or sacred pipe is passed around.

(from Wikipedia)

Aho Mitakuye Oyasin.

All my relations. I honor you in this circle of life with me today. I am grateful for this opportunity to acknowledge you in this prayer.

To the Creator, for the ultimate gift of life, I thank you.

To the mineral nation that has built and maintained my bones and all foundations of life experience, I thank you.

To the plant nation that sustains my organs and body and gives me healing herbs for sickness, I thank you.

To the animal nation that feeds me from your own flesh and offers your loyal companionship in this walk of life, I thank you.

To the human nation that shares my path as a soul upon the sacred wheel of Earthly life, I thank you.

To the Spirit nation that guides me invisibly through the ups and downs of life and for carrying the torch of light through the Ages, I thank you.

To the Four Winds of Change and Growth, I thank you.

You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny. One, not more important than the other. One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the one above and the one below.

All of us a part of the Great Mystery.

Thank you for this Life.

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Location of Knowing

What is the meaning behind this life?

Who is supposed to know whom?

Is life supposed to know you,

or are you supposed to know life?

- Gurumayi Chidvilasananda

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The Mountain Goats - This Year

... I drove home in the California dusk

i could feel the alcohol inside of me hum

pictured the look on my stepfather's face

ready for the bad things to come

i down shifted

as i pulled into the driveway

the motor screaming out

stuck in second gear

the scene ends badly

as you might imagine

in a cavalcade of anger and fear

there will be feasting and dancing

in Jerusalem next year

i am going to make it through this year

if it kills me

i am going to make it though this year

if it kills me

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Annunciation - Mati Klarwein - 1961

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Mexican Tile

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"In play, they are both equated and discriminated" - Gregory Bateson

"It is... a characteristic of unconscious or “primary-process” thinking that the thinker is unable to discriminate between “some” and “all,” and unable to discriminate between “not all” and “none.” It seems that the achievement of these discriminations is performed by higher or more conscious mental processes which serve in the non-psychotic individual to correct the black-and-white thinking of the lower levels. We assume, and this seems to be an orthodox assumption, that primary process is continually operating, and that the psychological validity of the paradoxical play frame depends upon this part of the mind.

But, conversely, while it is necessary to invoke the primary process as an explanatory principle in order to delete the notion of “some” from between “all” and “none,” this does not mean that play is simply a primary-process phenomenon. The discrimination between “play” and “nonplay,” like the discrimination between fantasy and non-fantasy, is certainly a function of secondary process, or “ego.” Within the dream the dreamer is usually unaware that he is dreaming, and within “play” he must often be reminded that “This is play.”

Similarly, within dream or fantasy the dreamer does not operate with the concept “untrue.” He operates with all sorts of statements but with a curious inability to achieve meta-statements. He cannot, unless close to waking, dream a statement referring to (i.e., framing) his dream. It therefore follows that the play frame as here used as an explanatory principle implies a special combination of primary and secondary processes. This, however, is related to what was said earlier, when it was argued that play marks a step forward in the evolution of communication—the crucial step in the discovery of map-territory relations. In primary process, map and territory are equated; in secondary process, they can be discriminated. In play, they are both equated and discriminated".

- Gregory Bateson

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To Stand Naked In Purgatorio

"If you had a hundred masks upon your face, your thoughts however slight, would still not be hidden from me." - Dante Alighieri (Purgatorio, Canto XV).

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Excerpt from A Theory of Play and Fantasy by Gregory Bateson (from his Steps to an Ecology of Mind).

"If we speculate about the evolution of communication, it is evident that a very important stage in this evolution occurs when the organism gradually ceases to respond quite 'automatically' to the mood signs of another and becomes able to recognize the sign as a signal: that is, to recognize that the other individual's and its own signals are only signals, which can be trusted, distrusted, falsified, denied, amplified, corrected, and so forth"

... this brief digression will serve to illustrate a stage of evolution - the drama precipitated when organisms, having eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, discover that their signals are signals. Not only the characteristically human invention of language can then follow, but also all the complexities of empathy, identification, projection, and so on. And with these comes the possibility of communicating at the multiplicity of levels of abstraction mentioned above".

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Source

Yeah, yeah...

... all of that happened, and then opened a curiosity. In words.

(ever so quietly)

Where is the source of this?

From where does it spring?

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.

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Burning Man Zodiac

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Mother Earth and Her Luna - Martina Hoffmann

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Magic Trip - Official Trailer

"We weren't old enough to be beatniks and we were a little too old to be hippies. Everybody I knew had read On The Road and it stirred us up. So we decided to go travel across the country. Because there was so many of us, we decided we'd buy a bus... Ken really believed things could be changed, he saw himself as a kind of liberator... people didn't think that we were hippies or that we were drug freaks, because it wasn't in the news yet".

"Once Pandora's Box is open, you can't regulate who gets to use the stuff that flies out of it".

I can't wait to see the story of Ken Kesey's trip through America on his peace bus with the Beats and a whole merry band of pranksters. It's a psychedelic road movie adventure - the promo called it "an acid trip on wheels". "It was like a troupe of minstrels... it looked like a travelling pleasure palace - it was big, and room, and spacious, until we got all the people in it". Kesey is the author of the classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and on this now legendary psychedelic road trip across 1960's America in a converted school bus took in the geography of place and people, witnessing firsthand the changes sweeping across the American psyche. Ken is quoted saying: "I thought this was American as you could get, because we were exploring a new territory". From the civil rights movement to the birth of free love and the hippie and flower power groundswell - they witnessed, and perhaps in many ways catalysed, the cultural revolution of 1960's USA which still reverberates around the world. "What it meant was that everyone had to consider a new way for things to be"...

Vale Steve Jobs. "Stay hungry. Stay foolish".

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

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3.10.11

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Excerpt from Orienting Unitive Ethics

"They are in tune with their precious "life's work" as a simultaneous expression of their unique selves and as part of one's shared humanity. They also care about the fundamental dilemma of the human condition. They work for justice, fairness, and benevolence towards all. Though taking responsibility for meaning making, they don't perceive themselves to be the sole and lone masters of their souls as envisioned by Autonomous individuals and to some degree Construct-aware people. Ways of being are infinite. Clues for the variety of possibilities of being are offered by the study of human history, by our current experience of human diversity and likely with new forms of being human evolving in the future, in nature, and in alternative, non-waking states of consciousness. Life can appear as fulfilling a cosmic purpose and therefore it is essentially simple. Doing or thinking are just modes of existing, but not intrinsically more valuable than feeling, being or non-being. The last is probably the most difficult idea to grasp by most people who have not developed beyond the personal realm. As a Buddhist percept says: Understanding is the ultimate illusion".

RT@BonnitaRoy, from http://www.cook-greuter.com/9%20levels%20of%20increasing%20embrace%20update%201%2007.pdf

Eye

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Albert Hoffman by Alex Grey

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;-)

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Worry Lines

New tunes from Hazzy Bee.

Worry Lines by hazzybee

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Radical Empiricism

"Just so, I maintain, does a given undivided portion of experience, taken in one context of associates, play the part of a knower, of a state of mind, of 'consciousness'; while in a different context the same undivided bit of experience plays the part of a thing known, of an objective 'content.' In a word, in one group it figures as a thought, in another group as a thing. And, since it can figure in both groups simultaneously we have every right to speak of it as subjective and objective, both at once".

- William James

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Immortalised Experience of Nature Mysticism

"Went yesterday to Cambridge and spent most of the day at Mount Auburn [Cemetery]; got my luncheon at Fresh Pond, and went back again to the woods. After much wandering and seeing many things, four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see not to eat, not for love, but only gliding; then a whole bed of Hepatica triloba, cousins of the Anemone, all blue and beautiful, but constrained by niggard nature to wear their last year's faded jacket of leaves; then a black-capped titmouse, who came upon a tree, and when I would know his name, sang chick-a-dee-dee; then a far-off tree full of clamorous birds, I know not what, but you might hear them half a mile. I forsook the tombs, and found a sunny hollow where the east wind would not blow, and lay down against the side of a tree to most happy beholdings. At least I opened my eyes and let what would pass through them into the soul. I saw no more my relation, how near and petty, to Cambridge or Boston; I heeded no more what minute or hour our Massachusetts clocks might indicate I saw only the noble earth on which I was born, with the great Star which warms and enlightens it. I saw the clouds that hang their significant drapery over us. It was Day that was all Heaven said. The pines glittered with their innumerable green needles in the light, and seemed to challenge me to read their riddle. The drab oak-leaves of the last year turned their little somersets and lay still again. And the wind bustled high overhead in the forest top. This gay and grand architecture, from the vault to the moss and lichen on which I lay, who shall explain to me the laws of its proportions and adornments?"

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal, April 11, 1834

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close".

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Re:Stacks

(c) RebekaJane - In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Chaldean myth, the character Utnapishtim releases a dove and a raven to find land, however, the dove merely circles and returns. Only then does Utnapishtim send forth the raven, who does not return. Utnapishtim extrapolates from this that the raven has found land, which is why it hasn't returned.

This my excavation and today is Kumran

Everything that happens is from now on



These lines open re: stacks, the final song on Bon Iver’s debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. Kumran (usually spelled ‘Qumran’) is the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947. It symbolizes a personal catharsis for Justin Vernon, the band’s sole member; Vernon retreated to his father’s Wisconsin log cabin for three months to record the album, chop wood, and generally be alone. He explains the Kumran metaphor himself here:



When they found them it changed the whole course of Christianity, whether people wanted to know it or not. A lot of people chose to ignore it, a lot of people decided to run with it, and for many people it destroyed their faith, so I think I was just looking at it as a metaphor for whatever happens after that is new shit.



The song also hints at a slow shedding of the skin, rather than a complete catharsis. In the last verse, Vernon sings:



This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization

It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away

Your love will be safe with me



It’s not a ‘crispy realization’ or a click of a lock in the door - a clean break from the past. In the final line he says that some of the past’s love will continue with him, like a pendant or a memory that won’t fade.



Not convinced? Vernon’s mom, Justine Vernon (real name, we assume), totally agrees. In this very adorable feature featuring several indie rock moms she says, “To me, it is not about getting over things and moving forward, it is about going through the sadness, taking some of it with you and being made whole because of it. I cry every time I listen to it”.



What ís good enough for Mrs. Vernon is good enough for us.

(courtesy of Wordsworth)



Re:Stacks – Bon Iver – For, Emma. Forever Ago.


This my excavation and today is Kumran

Everything that happens is from now on

This is pouring rain

This is paralyzed



I keep throwing it down two hundred at a time

It's hard to find it when you knew it

When your money's gone

And you're drunk as hell



On your back with your racks as the stacks as your load

In the back and the racks and the stacks are your load

In the back with your racks and you're unstacking your load



I've twisting to the sun I needed to replace

The fountain in the front yard is rusted out

All my love was down

In a frozen ground



There's a black crow sitting across from me; his wiry legs are crossed

And he's dangling my keys he even fakes a toss

Whatever could it be

That has brought me to this loss?



On your back with your racks as the stacks as your load

In the back and the racks and the stacks of your load

In the back with your racks and you're unstacking your load



This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization

It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away

Your love will be

Safe with me



A perfect re-birthday present.

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The Calm

from The Storm Before the Calm, released 10 August 2011

I let you in, I showed you round, I talked you up
But things got bad and you just said that I'm too much

I know now the distance made your heart fade

You're always sad, always down but you never cry
And always smart, always knowing but you're never wise

I know now that having makes your heart stray

Next time I go I won't come back
And I'll be taking all I've lacked and I will
You'll be needing me but I'll be leaving your heart
Your heart's gone down

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.

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Beautiful Introduction to the book American Transcendentalism

"In 1869, Louisa May Alcott, under the cognomen Tribulation Periwinkle, submitted to the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican a tongue-in-cheek letter with the "Latest News from Concord," Massachusetts. The town had long been associated with such residents as Ralph Waldo Emerson; her father, Bronson Alcott; and other representatives of the Transcendentalist movement that had flourished in New England thirty years before. "No gossip concerning this immortal town seems to be considered too trivial for the public," she observed, and thus she thought it her duty to add "the last rumor afloat."

Her humorous report was filled with jokes and puns today accessible mainly to scholars but in her time in common circulation. A new hotel was about to be established, she reported, called the Sphinx's Head, where "pilgrims to this modern Mecca" would be entertained in the most hospitable and appropriate style. "Walden water, aesthetic tea, and 'wine that never grew in the belly of the grape'" would be on tap for the refreshment of thirsty guests. "Wild apples by the bushel, orphic acorns by the peck, and Hawthorne's pumpkins, in the shape of pies," could be had "at philosophic prices." The accommodations themselves were special, for the inn would be furnished "with Alcott's rustic furniture, the beds made of Thoreau's pine boughs, and the sacred fires fed from the Emersonian woodpile." Moreover, the thoughtful proprietors would provide telescopes for those who wished "to watch the soarings of the Oversoul, when visible." The innkeeper would supply, gratis, samples of "Autumn Tints, Mosses from the Manse, Rhodora, and herbs from the Garden," as well as "photographs of the faces divine which have conferred immortality upon one of the dullest little towns in Massachusetts."

Most important to those eager to catch a glimpse of the community's famous residents (who by this time included Alcott herself), the hotel also would provide a daily bulletin to announce "the most favorable hours for beholding the various lions" who still roamed Concord's landscape. It would look something like this:

Emerson will walk at 4 p.m. 

Alcott will converse from 8 a.m. till 11 p.m. 

Channing may be seen with the naked eye at sunset. 

The new Hermit will grind his meal at noon, precisely. 

The ladies of Concord will not be exhibited on Sundays.

The need for such an establishment, Periwinkle concluded, had been long and deeply felt, especially because each spring brought "with the robins, a flock of reporters" who, like the inquisitive birds, "roost upon Concordian fences, chirp on Concordian door-steps, and hop over Concordian fields and hills, scratching vigorously, as if hoping to unearth a new specimen from what is popularly believed to be the hot-bed of genius."

Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames Official Trailer

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Tree Of Life

I took heart in this depiction of the sephirot and main hindu chakras side by side. If you click it, it gets a lot bigger! ;-D

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Pinchbeck thorough Marx and Levi-Strauss...

"The dialectical process that creased the possessive mind-set of the capitalist and the 'rational' outlook of the technocrat requires destruction of the premodern vestiges of communal and animistic beliefs, whether these beliefs were found in isolated pockets of Europe or in the indigenous populations of the New World. This destruction was part of the process that Karl Marx described as the alienation of all of our physical and intellectual senses into one sense: the sense of having.

 

Of course, "the sense of having" is not really a sense – it is an illusion of fulfilment that seems to extent outside of the self.

 

Modernism created a profound shift in the way we use our senses. In his book Myth and Meaning, Levi-Strauss admitted his initial shock when he discovered that Indian tribesmen were able to see the planet Venus in daylight, with the naked eye – "something that to me would be utterly impossible and incredible".  But he learned from astronomers that it was feasible, and he found ancient accounts of Western navigators with the same ability. "Today we use less and we use more of our mental capacity than we did in the past," he realised. We have sacrificed perceptual capacities for other mental abilities – to concentrate on a computer screen while sitting in a cubicle for many hours at a stretch (something those Indians would find "utterly impossible and incredible"), or to shut off multiple levels of awareness as we drive a car in heavy traffic. In other words, we are brought up within a system that teaches us to postpone, defer, and eliminate most incoming sense data in favour of a future reward. We live in a feedback loop of perpetual postponement. For the most part, we are not even aware of what we have lost".

- Daniel Pinchbeck 

The Mind and the Vagrant Senses

"The mind is attached as by an elastic cord to the vagrant senses".

- R. Gordon Wasson

Henry Miller

"The goal of life is not to possess power but to radiate it".

- Henry Miller

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Another Fantastic Passage from Pinchbeck's Breaking Open The Head

"Piece by piece, the pattern of my past began to flare up in my mind. For the next several hours, I forgot about the tribesmen watching me. I was witnessing a "memory theater", a scrupulous replaying of all the elements of my early life – my parents' separation, my father's absence from my childhood, the imprint of my mother's loneliness and depression, my own solitude and love of reading, the many months I spent in a hospital bed at the age of eleven with a bacterial infection in my spine. I went back to the secret, baroque sources of childhood nightmare and fantasy – the primal fear of the monsters under the bed, the cave of darkness inside the closet, I saw the desperate, desolate parts of my life and the flashes of power and invention that were also mine. Separate from myself, yet enclosed within myself, I followed the traces of the being that I was, that was given to me, as it unfolds over time.

 

Laid out for me was the entire, intricate process of my self-development. The process was complex yet ultimately organic. The extension of the self was, I realized, a natural process, akin to the blossoming of a plant. While a plant extends towards the sun throughout its life, human beings evolve internally. We rise up and flourish, or become stunted, involuted, as we react to the forces that press against us. Our growth takes place in the invisible realm of our mental space, and the unreachable sun we rise toward is knowledge – of the self and the Universe.

 

Henry James once described human consciousness as "a helpless jelly poured into a mold". Iboga compelled me to perceive the exact shape of that mold; at the same time, it allowed me to escape that sense of helplessness. I felt a mingling of wonder, sorrow and freedom. By letting me perceive the shape of my past self, Iboga also seemed to be freeing me from the burden of that past. The action of the medicine actually was – as I had heard it described but wouldn't believe – the equivalent of ten years of psychoanalysis compacted into one interminable night…

 

… Through Iboga, I recognized my existing self as the product of all the physical and psychological forces that had acted upon me. Yet there seemed to be something beyond all of it, something that was "mine," an energy projected from outside of my biographical destiny. That energy was the self – and the self's tremendous capacity for transformation".

- Daniel Pinchbeck

Bon Iver

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MJio3s2wFI&NR=1
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Temple of Transition

Dear Temple of Transition from Ian MacKenzie on Vimeo.

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Accepting the Little Demons

"Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon".

- Emily Dickinson

RT@TrishNowland

"Waking is a Dialectical Moment..."

"[Walter] Benjamin describes awakening as a historical and generational process as well as an individual one. History is the effort made by each age to bring the "not-yet conscious knowledge of what has been" into awareness. Waking is a "dialectical moment" suspended between the dreamworld of the past and the transformative energy locked within the present".

- Daniel Pinchbeck.

For the Bay Area...

Fave:

All my little plans and schemes,

lost like some forgotten dreams.

Seems that all I really was doing

was waitin' for you.

Just like little girls and boys,

playing with their little toys.

Seems like all we really were doing

was waitin' for love.

Don't need to be alone,

No need to be alone.

It's real love, it's real,

Yes it's real love, it's real.

From this moment on I know,

exactly where my life will go.

Seems that all I really was doing

was waitin' for love.

Don't need to be afraid,

No need to be afraid.

It's real love, it's real,

Yes it's real love, it's real.

Thought I'd been in love before,

but in my heart I wanted more.

Seems like all I really was doing

was waitin' for you.

Don't to be alone,

No need to be alone.

It's real love, yeah it's real,

It's real love, it's real,

Yes, it's real love, it's real,

It's real love, it's real,

Yes it's real love, it's real,

It's real love, it's real,

Yes it's real love, it's real,

It's real love, it's real,

Yes it's real love....

Second Fave:

Third Fave:

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Little

So you just put me away

I'm something you don't need now but just might one day

There's nothing much for me to say

I'll probly say it all once you have gone away

When you're too tired to raise your little head

Just raise your little hand instead

I know it still doesn't seem glad

But this is my first song in years that isn't sad

I heard you singing through the wall

I told you that it wasn't any good at all

When you're too tired to raise your little head

Just raise your little hand instead

from The Storm Before the Calm, released 10 August 2011

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Band of Horses @ The Fillmore in San Francisco

Can't wait for this excellent twist of fate tomorrow night...

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My Favourite Quotations so far from Breaking Open The Head

"Being prepared to receive what thought is not prepared to think is what deserves the name of thinking". - Jean-Francois Lyotard

"Whenever there is a reaching down into innermost experience, into the nucleus of personality, most people are overcome by fear and many run away. The risk of inner experience, the adventure of the spirit, is in any case alien to most human beings. The possibility that such experience might have psychic reality is anathema to them". - Carl Jung

"People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul". - Carl Jung

"The reader, the thinker, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. Not to mention that most terrible drug - ourselves - which we take in solitude". - Walter Benjamin

"Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship". - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I carry your heart with me by e. e. cummings

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Saturday, 3 September 2011

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William Carlos Williams

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

- William Carlos Williams

Robert Hass

"Images are not quite ideas; they are stiller than that, with less implica- tion outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have that explanatory power; they are closer to pure story" 

- Robert Hass

A Retreat from Poetry: Concretization and Reification

A flurry of posts from this great paper: The Opening of the Field: Thoughts on the Poetics of Psychoanalytic Treatment, by David Shaddock

"Both therapists and patients are likely to retreat from the shared conjunction of metaphorical space into the relative safety of the literal and concrete. In this they are enacting, or reenacting, a retreat from a self sustained by selfobject relationships into a self sustained by concretization and reification. Such a retreat accomplishes two goals: It shores up a shakily organized subjective world, and it withdraws from an ambiguous and potentially disappointing relationship context into the protection of a separate and inviolable belief in the objective reality of one's thoughts and feelings (Stolorow, Brandchaft, and Atwood, 1987). Concretization is a universal hallmark of subjective experience, but it comes to dominate psychic organization when "early, validating responsiveness has been consistently absent or grossly unreliable" (Stolorow et al., 1987, p. 133). Then a retreat to the literal, or to the compulsive, as in psychosexual enactments, dominates and isolates psychic life. One way of understanding the therapy process is to see it as elevating concretizations into metaphors—vehicles of shared understanding. Adequate therapeutic treatment lifts the patient's communications out of their literal heaviness and lets them float in the room as mutually held conduits for understanding. In this sense, a life of rigidly held, even delusional beliefs, a life of compulsive sexual enactments or psychosomatizations, is a life without poetry. And from my perspective as poet and therapist, I add it is a life in search of poetry—of a metaphor replete with shared meanings.

If patients are prone to reduce metaphors to the literal, therapists are prone to move in the opposite direction, to elevate metaphors into reified universal truths. Reification involves a withdrawal from the poetic, from the intersubjective. To speak of a patient's Oedipus complex as something that exists as an entity is to withdraw from the intersubjective power of metaphor in which a patient's description of being "shot down" when he asked his father for a loan interacts with the therapist's own construction of meanings—based perhaps on trace memories of his own childhood shame and rage, his reading in a college survey course of Sophocles' shocking play, his reading of Freud and subsequent theorists. The reification of metaphors withdraws them from the intersubjective field and coats them with a kind of pseudoscientific Teflon. Metaphors, on the other hand, are adhesive—they draw meanings to them".